The Lutheran pietist philosopher Johann Georg Hamann wrote these priceless Christian words: "The more edifying the speaker, the heavier his Galilean shibboleth weighs on our ears." I have indeed found it to be true that the biblical idiom has an unmatched power to build up its hearers in love. These days I read a lot of philosophy and, whether ancient or modern, it can't compare. Yet this "biblical" upbuilding speech is not without offense. To speak in a way that sounds, well, like the Bible is, in a pretentious pagan age (and aren't all ages), at once obtuse, provincial, unsophisticated, and (how embarrassing) chained to the clunky parable-mouthing particularity of the Man from Galilee. Yet such thick-tongued humility finds ways to love while priests and Levites pass on by.
John Wesley, like him or love him, could not be accused of neglecting the biblical idiom. His sermons glow, or sometimes sag, with Scripture's peculiar phrasings. He famously called himself homo unius libri, "a man of one book." You got it — he means the Bible. Yet, as Randy Maddox notes, Wesley owned over 1,000 books, ranging from Christian history to medicine, politics, poetry, and beyond. The elegant harmony Wesley (like Hamann) saw between the thousands of books and the One Book is already inscribed in his bold self-moniker — do not let the humor pass you by — Wesley announces that he is homo unius libri in Latin. He is an Oxford Bible Moth, to be sure.
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